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Xamarin: 2018 Hot Topics

Xamarin: 2018 Hot Topics

A new year is just beginning but .net mobile development is moving very fast and a tons of new features & tools are being created or updated, next I'll list only a few new things that will help to improve your .net mobile skills.

App Center (formerly Azure Mobile Center) is CI platform
that allow you build, test, release and monitor your apps in a very fast and
friendly way, currently the platform supports Swift, Obj-C, Java, Xamarin &
React Native also you can start with the free tier and pay as your app grows.

As part of the platform you’ll able to use the next 6
features.

- Build

Allow to use common Git services like VSTS, GitHub &
Bitbucket to create automated build based on push triggers or manual build
tasks also you’re able to configure custom build scripts, environment
variables, Custom signing certificates, distribute and testing taks.

- Test

This feature allows you to configure test runs and device
sets with a lot of latest and popular physical devices, using the Xamarin Test
Cloud platform, also it support the most common UI testing frameworks like
Espresso, XCUITest, Appium & Xamarin.UITest the free tier contain a 30 days
trial but you can always take a look to pricing here
https://appcenter.ms/#pricing

- Distribute

You’re able also to share and publish your packages to
specific Groups Test Users, iTunes Connect / Google Play or Intune, also you
can manage all your releases.

- Crash (Preview)

One of my favorites features in this section you’re able to
get any crash details before the user report to you, allowing you to get all
the insights about the crash like user, device and crash messages, you can
configure to get an email every time that new crash is reported.

- Analytics

Get all the information about your app usage sessions,
active users, session duration, devices, languages, events, log flows etc. this
a good way take decisions based on your user’s needs.

- Push (Preview)

You can send push notifications to your users based on
specific audiences filtered by app version, country, mobile carrier, etc.

If you want to learn more about Visual Studio App Center
keep alert on new blog posts since starting this month I’ll create a post
series about the platform.

2. Live Player

One of the first visions of Microsoft after bought Xamarin
was to allow developers get immersed into Mobile Development in a faster way
and with the Live Player this commitment is about to be a reality. Live Player
is a preview tool that helps to preview yours apps direct on your test
Android/iOS devices while you’re writing code on your IDE with simply read a QR
code on your VS, if you want to try this tool you can get all the details here:
https://www.xamarin.com/live

3. Xamarin.Forms 2.5 / 2.6

Xamarin.Forms is adding a whole brand-new features and performance
updates as you can see in the next list:

Forms 2.5.X

- Layout Compression

Removes specified layouts from items from visual tree in
order to improve screen rendering performance.

- Fast Renderers

This feature works only for Android it helps to reduce the
cost of native control rendering by flattening native view hierarchy.

- Forms Embedding

Forms Embedding allow to export and use easily Xamarin.Forms
pages into Xamarin.Classic projects.

- Improved macOS & Desktop Support

macOS support is a preview feature, App exit function was
added & new desktop menus actions for common behaviors on desktop apps.

Forms 2.6.X

- CSS Styles

This a very controversy and nightly feature, this feature
will allow to support CSS styles on Xamarin.Forms to allow have a very cleaner
XAML definitions and use a standard way of styling into the platform. If you
want to test it you can go and follow next blog: http://www.davidortinau.com/blog/styling_xamarin_forms_with_css

4. .NetStandard 2.X

.NetStandard was released during 2016 and version 2.0 on
2017 this is the evolution and a new way of share code over different platforms
for the .Net framework, currently .NetStandard is fully supported on Visual
Studio for Windows, the Mac version have some limitations since Xamarin.Forms
templates doesn’t have a way to direct support 2.x version and you need to
create the project manually, but that support is priority, so we will have soon
a fully support on Mac, so that means that 2018 is a good year to start moving
from PCL to .NetStandard.

5. Goodbye Xamarin Components – Hello nuget

This was announced on last November the support will be
continue having support for projects that have already items from Xamarin
Components but soon o later this will be deprecated so I highly recommend to
use the nuget version or contact plugin vendor for your Xamarin Components
dependencies before this happen. For more info go to here: https://blog.xamarin.com/hello-nuget-new-home-xamarin-components/

6. C# 7.X

Was introduced by mid of 2017, C# 7 introduce a lot of cool
features like:

Xamarin.Forms: Custom Context Actions on iOS
Hello folks now is time to talk about customize context action views on Xamarin.Forms cell for iOS (yes the red/light-gray options that appear when you swipe a cell) the default colors are not a good-looking, so right now is a little bit tricky to achieve that but we will use a reflection technique to achieve the next two escenarios: Change background color for default and destructive context actionSet custom view for default and destructive context action
first at all, lets take a look to native impl. on Xamarin.Forms Github project on the next url https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/blob/ae92582d5acad2b8aeab9a2ed5b490561e71bd6c/Xamarin.Forms.Platform.iOS/ContextActionCell.cs#L14

Here we have two key items "DestructiveBackground" and "NormalBackground" both are the Images that Xamarin.Forms use to put as background on the default ContextActions view(Gray/Red)